Free The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo

speak to me of but the elephant?”
    “We want you to do the magic that will send her home,” said Peter.
    The magician laughed; it was not a pleasant sound. “Send her home, you say? And why would I do that?”
    “Because she will die if you do not,” said Peter.
    “And why will she die?”
    “She is homesick,” said Peter. “I think that her heart is broken.”
    “A homesick, broken-hearted magic trick,” said the magician. He laughed again. He shook his head. “It was all so magnificent when it happened; it was all so wondrous when it occurred – you would not believe it; truly you would not. And look what it has come to.”
    Somewhere in the prison, someone was crying. It was the kind of strangled weeping that Vilna Lutz sometimes gave himself over to when he thought that Peter was asleep.
    The world is broken, thought Peter, and it cannot be fixed.
    The magician kept still, his head pressed against the bars. The sound of the prisoner weeping rose and fell, rose and fell. And then Peter saw that the magician was crying too; great, lonely tears rolled down his face and disappeared into his beard.
    May be it was not too late after all.
    “I believe,” said Peter very quietly.
    “What do you believe?” said the magician without moving.
    “I believe that things can still be set right. I believe that you can perform the necessary magic.”
    The magician shook his head. “No.” He said the word quietly, as if he were speaking it to himself. “No.”
    There was a long silence.
    Leo Matienne cleared his throat, once, and then again. He opened his mouth and spoke two simple words. He said, “What if?”
    The magician raised his head then and looked at the policeman. “What if?” he said. “‘What if?’ is a question that belongs to magic.”
    “Yes,” said Leo, “to magic and also to the world in which we live every day. So: what if? What if you merely tried?”
    “I tried already,” said the magician. “I tried and failed to send her back.” The tears continued to roll down his face. “You must understand: I did not want to send her back; she was the finest magic I have ever performed.”
    “To return her to where she belongs would be a fine magic too,” said Leo Matienne.
    “So you say,” said the magician. He looked at Leo Matienne and then at Peter and then back again at Leo Matienne.
    “Please,” said Peter.
    The light from the lantern in Leo’s outstretched arm flickered, and the magician’s shadow, cast on the wall behind him, reared back suddenly and then grew larger. The shadow stood apart from him as if it were another creature entirely, watching over him, waiting anxiously, along with Peter, for the magician to decide what seemed to be the fate of the entire universe.
    “Very well,” said the magician at last. “I will try. But I will need two things. I will need the elephant, for I cannot make her disappear without her being present. And I will need Madam LaVaughn. You must bring both the elephant and the noblewoman here to me.”

    “But that is impossible,” said Peter.
    “Magic is always impossible,” said the magician. “It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic.”

M adam LaVaughn was often kept awake at night by shooting pains in her legs. And because she was awake, she insisted that the whole household stay awake with her.
    Further, she insisted that they listen again to the story of how she had dressed for the theatre that night, how she had walked into the building (Walked! On her own two legs!) entirely and absolutely innocent of the fate that awaited her inside. She insisted that the gardener and the cook, the serving maids and the chambermaids, pretend to be interested as she spoke again of how the magician had selected her from among the sea of hopefuls.
    “‘Who, then, will come before me and receive my magic?’ Those were his exact words,” said Madam LaVaughn.
    The assembled